But foundering experiments like Glass are also reminders of why Google remains such a smart company. Though well past its startup days, Google is still not afraid of massive, embarrassing failures. This is, after all, a company that just teamed up with Fidelity to invest $1 billion in commercial space startup SpaceX days after it crashed a rocket.

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As companies grow into corporations, they typically become less innovative. This makes sense — young companies achieve breakthroughs; older companies make money finding new ways to turn those breakthroughs into profit. General Motors, one of the first modern corporations, still produces essentially the same thing it did when corporate management structures first emerged in the 1920s. America’s corporate heyday was ushered in by companies like Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola that were more focused on production innovation than product innovation.

Cliff Oxford, founder of the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs, said he typically sees companies pull back from innovation right around the time revenue reaches $600million. (Google’s annual revenue exceeds $50 billion.)

“They become a corporation, and then the corporation focuses on exploiting their competitive advantage rather than experimenting and innovating,” he said.

Even at companies that had groundbreaking research departments such as Xerox and Bell Labs, radical new ideas were often dismissed by corporate management. In the 1970s, researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center engineered innovations that would revolutionize personal computing, including the mouse, graphical user interface and the bitmapped screen.

Missed opportunity

Xerox’s board of directors, however, wasn’t interested in pursuing new technologies that might interfere with the business of making copiers.

Instead, in exchange for the opportunity to invest $1 million in a new company called Apple, Xerox allowed Steve Jobs to see some of its experimental technologies. According to Owen W. Linzmayer’s book “Apple Confidential 2.0,” Jobs reportedly began shouting, “Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is revolutionary!”

“When you grow large, it’s very difficult to maintain the growth you have had historically,” said David Hounshell, a historian of innovation at Carnegie Mellon University. “Xerox was a classic problem. The company’s core mission was copying, which made it really hard to think about entering a new space.”

Consequently, while Apple and Microsoft grew into a duopoly of the personal computing industry, Xerox missed out on the whole revolution.

“To some extent, Xerox has never recovered from that failure,” said Hounshell. “That’s far more typical of large companies.”

Even Facebook, which became a multibillion-dollar company living by the motto “move fast and break things,” has attracted speculation that the company’s pace of innovation is slowing down. At a developer conference last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg joked that the company’s new motto was “move fast with stable infrastructure.”

It “may not be quite as catchy as 'move fast and break things,’” he said. “But it’s how we operate now.”

MySpace reigned as the Internet’s largest social network until it failed to top Facebook’s newer, more compelling features. The history of business is a cycle of new innovation eclipsing old.

“You can go down the list of giants that no longer exist — Polaroid, Kodak, DEC. They all failed to continue innovating,” said Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School. “It’s not easy to keep that culture alive.”

Bigger company, bigger risks

As Google has grown, though, its risks have tended to just get riskier — exploring everything from space travel to self-driving cars to extending the length of human life. And its list of failures runs long: social networks, wearables, microblogging, print advertising.

“We celebrate our failures,” then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt told an audience in 2010 when the company announced the surprise shuttering of Google Wave, a communication platform the company had launched the year prior.

Perhaps more than its predecessors, Google has cultivated a company-wide culture of innovation. Google is famous for encouraging all employees — not just the R&D department — to spend 20 percent of their working hours pursuing passion projects, even if they are unrelated to their jobs. When Google filed for its initial public offering in 2004, it disclosed in its Risk Assessment that if the company did not continue to innovate, it would die.

“Google is a little unique in that the whole company is being assessed on this risk-taking ability,” said Marie Hicks, a historian of technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “Most companies are more focused on the bottom line.”

Failure, Edmondson said, is a good business strategy because it is really the only effective strategy for discovering big new successes.

“We can look at Google’s widely publicized failures like Glass and either say, 'Wow, they are are really innovative,’ or, 'Wow, they messed up again,’” she said. “I’m more inclined to say they are really innovative.”

While big corporations often grow risk-averse, Google’s size might be the very thing that mitigates the risks of innovation.

“Google may have a vested interest in failure as a strategy for success,” said Hicks. “But at this point Google is sort of too big to fail.”